Yesterday I took part in the Taming Tabloid Tittle Tattle debate at the brilliant Battle of Ideas at the Barbican. Roy Greenslade and I, loosely defending the right to celebrity privacy, took on Jo Phillips and Patrick Hayes, arguing the case for unrestricted press freedom. I say loosely because what emerged through the very wide […]

This weekend I’m taking part in the Battle of Ideas Festival at the Barbican- a fantastic event that gets 350 illustrious speakers from around the globe and all walks of life together to ‘shape the future through debate’. There’s a highly pertinent strand of the programme focussing on Battle for the Media, that will be […]

Looking carefully at the one-eyed Manga nightmares that are the 2012 Olympic mascots, I have been wondering at the designers’ thinking – and not as negatively as you might suspect. I think there may be a classicist at work behind these Cyclopses. According to Hesiod, the Cyclopses were strong, stubborn giants who were “abrupt of […]

Pictures of Danny Cipriani with Kelly Brook adorn the papers today and I’ve had numerous calls from the media wondering whether Kelly and Danny are now the new golden couple. What are these pictures that are strewn over the papers today actually saying? Basically I think these pictures are saying here are two people and […]

Despite having been a social pariah not so long ago, thanks to her role in the racist bullying on Celebrity Big Brother in January, Danielle Lloyd seems to be making something of a career statement – in the pages of the tabloids at least – despite headlines mere weeks ago suggesting that she’d never work […]